Meet the Walthamstow Artist Reinforcing the Personal as Political

Emma Talbot is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Walthamstow. Her work draws from the surrounding forests, the contemporary community, and the borough's cultural past to create works that explore individual, interior experience alongside broader, exterior questions about the environment and an increasingly technological world. 

I’ve lived and worked in Walthamstow for the past 14 years. it’s the place I’ve lived and worked the longest in my life. I’ve brought my two sons up here. It was relatively cheap, with good transport, there was studio space available and it was a good mix of city and space – the Lea Valley and Epping Forest. 

Obviously, it has changed over the years, and there is a pressure on the cost of living and studio space which makes it harder for artists to stay here, but it’s a place I’m very fond of.

My work explores the inner landscape of personal thought, emotion and self-narrative. These individual subjectivities are then cast into wider narratives, addressing current contemporary concerns – to articulate the back-and-forth of interior and exterior, reinforcing the personal as political. 

The focus of my work always follows issues that really matter to me at the time of making. I look for appropriate and inventive articulations, across a range of media and registers - through image, text, pattern - painting on silk, drawing, 3D forms, sound and installation - to convey both heartfelt and thoughtfully provocative narratives.

Madge Gill was an untaught artist and psychic, who thought that her production was guided by a spirit who told her what to make. Her work contains lots of mysterious signs and symbols that she was unable to decipher, but she was convinced to draw and was hugely prolific and inventive. Her output is really idiosyncratic and it is interesting that her work still engages audiences today.

Rather than involve myself with a biography of her life or a response to her style of making, I wanted to explore that drive and vision that prompts anyone to make. Inventive making seems to allow for a kind of free thinking beyond the ordinary. 

The imagery in my piece described figures reaching into other dimensions, floating, dreaming and tuning in to other vibrations. The title ‘Your Own Authority’ refers to a belief in your own ideas, and the way individual actions contribute to the location – the borough of Waltham Forest.

The space I used is the tea room in the gallery. I like the challenge of figuring out inventive ways that painted work can occupy space. I was keen to make a piece that would be a canopy above the space, so that you could look up at the painted images, with cut out painted plants and motifs hanging down. The lightness of the painted silk worked with the glass roof and transformed the space without disturbing the activities of the community that used it.

We’re living through disruptive and volatile times, both politically and environmentally, and it seems impossible to make work about what it’s like to be alive today without addressing prevalent issues that that form the zeitgeist of our times. My work sets up layered narratives that ask lots of questions and propose positions, for e.g. what it’s like to be a citizen in a regenerating city, how we can imagine the future, what our relationships are to technology, to nature, and how these are absorbed psychologically.

I see the figures as me, from an internal view rather than an external view. When we look out at the world, we can’t see our own faces, we just see an open portal. As well as being me, I hope they become a figure that others can project onto, that acts out various experiences, emotions and responses to the world. I am interested in the gestures and positions of the figure conveying feeling rather than any facial expression which would limit them to a nameable person or portrait.

I have an exhibition at the GEM Kunstmuseum in The Hague until February 2020, titled “Sounders of the Depths’, which is also the title of a piece of work in the show - 68 drawings suspended on a 16m wall of wires, that reflect on the urgency of climate change. 

There are images of noxious gases being released, volcanoes erupting, explosions, fires, earthquakes, floods, drowned figures and heatwaves – all narratives based on news stories over the last 6 months. The text pieces in the work describe the world gasping in horror and ask if there is still magic locked in nature that we can access (without being exploitative) to make alternative uses of power, and cast a different relationship with the natural world.

Sounders of the Depths were ancient mariners, who dropped plumblines over the sides of ships to feel for and avoid rocks below that could wreck the ship and to navigate a safe course to proceed. The title comes from a text by Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre, who described a principle of tuning in to the natural world, via principles of permaculture and alternative ways of living and thinking, to detect a sustainable way forward.

Art is a space for thinking, reflecting and proposing ideas. It’s a way to explore our living experience. It reflects our times and suggests that we can think expansively. I think the personal is political and personal experience can enlighten and inform political positions. I’m interested in formulating narratives that reposition the structures of power and ask if power can be put to different uses.